Big River

Johnny Cash was on a touring break when he picked up an article titled "Johnny Cash Has the Big River Blues in His Voice." Soon after, he wrote a lovelorn country tune about a man who is so smitten by a woman and her irresistible Southern drawl that he pursues her down the Mississippi River - and misses her at every turn. Cash is backed by Luther Perkins on guitar, who delivers an electrifying solo, and Marshall Grant on bass. The single peaked at #4 on the country chart.

Cash had a much different sound in mind for the tune before Sun Records founder Sam Phillips got a hold of it. "When I wrote 'Big River,' I wrote it [to be sung] real slow, not up-tempo as I did it on record," he explained in a 1988 interview with biographer Steve Turner. "There was a guitar player named Roy Nichols, who later worked with Merle Haggard, and he used to play that song with me, and he played some really black blues on it. It sounded like a real blues song. Sam Phillips wanted it upbeat, and he made it sound like a rockabilly song."

Cash uses poetic imagery to express his heartache, opening the song with the verse "I taught the weeping willow how to cry, and I showed the clouds how to cover up a clear blue sky." The song made a big impression on his daughter Rosanne Cash, who recorded it in 1980 for the album Right or Wrong. She said: "I think my dad's 'Big River' is one of the most eloquent pieces of American poetry ever written. It is so layered and cinematic. It's a narrative that starts at the top of the Mississippi River, in St Paul, Minnesota, and ends in New Orleans. It was written about a time when travel was still full of surprises, when it was an exotic trip to go from St Paul to Memphis or New Orleans. He uses alliteration in a thrilling way. The first line of the last verse always gives me a thrill. It is positively Shakespearean. I like knowing my dad was so moved by the river, the South, the Delta and the music that arose from that area. It inspires me he had such an intuitive and refined sense of narrative and language, that he created a cinematic landscape, a testosterone-fueled chase of a woman down the river, and that he wrote such a driving back beat to hold it together. This is a song that could never be written today, and so it is also a piece of American history and part of the legacy of my family and my country."